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Petit Le Mans: Peugeot and Ferrari teams win at Road Atlanta

Peugeot won the Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta on Saturday for the third year in a row. Photo by LAT PHOTOGRAPHIC

Peugeot on Saturday claimed a third consecutive win in the American Le Mans Series' Petit Le Mans, the 1,000-mile endurance road-racing classic at Road Atlanta that ends the ALMS season.

The Peugeot 908 turbodiesel LMP1-class car driven by Franck Montagny, Stephane Sarrazin and Alex Wurz won by five laps after both Audi R18 TDIs retired. The German manufacturer's hopes for victory disappeared early in the eighth of 10 hours, when Romain Dumas tangled with a Porsche GT Challenge-class car as he was mounting a bid for the lead.

Montagny was delayed by the Porsche in turn seven, allowing Dumas to get a run on him out of the corner. As the Peugeot moved across to claim the racing line for the following left-hand kink, Dumas tagged the Porsche and crashed out of the race in the car he shared with Marcel Fassler and Timo Bernhard.

The result gave Peugeot the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup LMP1 manufacturers' title with one ILMC race left to run.

The previous-generation Peugeot 908 HDi entered by Oreca finished second after a trouble-free run in the hands of Nicolas Lapierre and on-loan factory drivers Marc Gene and Nicolas Minassian. It finished one lap up on Stefan Mucke, Adrian Fernandez and Harold Primat in the Aston Martin Racing Lola coupe, which also enjoyed no problems on the way to third place.

The second factory-backed Audi retired late in the race with steering problems. The car, shared by Allan McNish, Tom Kristensen and Rinaldo Capello, fell down the order following two long stops for repairs after McNish was hit in the rear by a GT car.

The LMP2 class was won by the Level 5 Motorsports HPD driven by Christophe Bouchut, Joao Barbosa and team owner Scott Tucker. They battled with the Signatech Oreca-Nissan until the French car ran into power-steering problems.

The AF Corse team's Ferrari 458 driven by Gianmaria Bruni, Giancarlo Fisichella and Pierre Kaffer came back from a lap down to win the GT class. They lost the lap with a stop-go penalty after Fisichella ran a red light at the end of the pit lane, but the car regained the lost ground quickly. Bruni then got the better of the Team Rahal Letterman Lanigan BMW M3 driven by Joey Hand in his final stint.